Sections

Five lessons from the Quebec election campaign

A pollster has projected victory for the Quebec Liberals under Philippe Couillard, above, ranging from a minority to a 75-seat majority — with with 63 seats needed to reach that threshold. Quebecers go to the polls on Monday. Photo: Jacques Boissinot/THE CANADIAN PRESS

In the waning hours of Quebec’s provincial campaign the race was very much still in flux. A spate of recent polls have shown Philippe Couillard’s Liberals holding a solid 10-point lead in voter intentions, but with Francois Legault’s Coalition Avenir Quebec making strong late gains, mainly at the PQ’s expense. But it’s all guesswork: A significant minority of the electorate, 25 per cent, remained undecided in the final days. The vote-splitting effect of the CAQ and Quebec Solidaire add another big dollop of uncertainty.

Poll aggregator Eric Grenier, in his final pre-election summary projected a Liberal victory, ranging from a 58-seat minority (of the 125 in Quebec’s legislature) to a 75-seat majority, with 69 the median. Sixty-three seats are required for a majority.

Here are five takeaways from the campaign just ended:

Quebec’s democracy is healthy

It has been an unusually raucous contest, with much mud slung and many personal attacks made, sparking the usual hair-tearing about the decline of politics and democracy, the dearth of civility in public affairs and so on. Well, maybe. Among the campaigns I’ve watched over the past 25 years, this was one of the more aggressive and intense. For sheer vitriol and passion, it may have topped them all.

But that’s not necessarily all bad. The cut and thrust of debate and reportage in Quebec media over the past month has been a sight to behold. Investigative reporting by journalists such as Radio Canada’s Alain Gravel, and independent commentary by columnists such as La Presse’s Vincent Marissal, set a high standard indeed. So did the four main party leaders themselves, in two televised contests; these were among the most hard-fought, intelligently gruelling political debates I have seen.

Quebec nationalists need a MacKay-Harper-style coalition

Where the Parti Quebecois once held all the hard-nationalist turf in Quebec, it now shares it with the CAQ, which is nationalist but not separatist, and Quebec Solidaire, which is separatist but left of centre. It’s in some ways the equivalent of the Canadian right in the 1990s — a divided field, with no nationalist party able to cobble together the votes, in a first-past-the-post system, to gain a plurality.

That has given the federalist, pro-bilingual Liberals, under Couillard, a strategic advantage, which separatist and hard-nationalist forces will find difficult to overcome, as long as they work at cross-purposes. Their problem — a happy one for the ROC — is that there is now very wide variance between the PQ, out on the right, with its anti-pluralistic charter of values and its Pierre Karl Peladeau, and the socialist idealists at Quebec Solidaire. Legault of the CAQ has also made any future anti-Liberal coalition between his party and the PQ difficult, if not impossible, simply by the force of his attacks on Marois and the PQ’s record, in this campaign.

It’s all about Montreal

No Quebec government would ever accept the partitioning-off of Montreal, the beautiful, beating heart of La Belle Province. Yet if it weren’t for the island of Montreal, with its two million inhabitants, its traditions of bilingualism, multiculturalism and vibrant pluralism, the Parti Quebecois would have a much clearer field, numerically speaking. For the separatists Montreal is both a treasure and a curse. That’s what we in the ROC call a conundrum. One hopes that Pauline Marois will have ample free time to consider a solution in the years ahead.

God is in the visuals

The methodology of democratic politics continues to evolve, driven mostly by social media and omnipresent video. Even in the 18 months since the last Quebec campaign, the spotlight on candidates and leaders has grown brighter, the highlighting of inconsistencies, blips and shifts in direction harsher, and the room for mistakes further reduced. Kathleen Wynne, Tim Hudak and Andrea Horwath, take note.

The Marois campaign was a collection of miscues captured on video — Pierre Karl Peladeau’s upraised fist and Le push, to name the two most important — in which gestures that might not have registered to the same extent in campaigns past, were magnified a thousand-fold. Such moments are, by their nature, unscripted, which undermines central message discipline. This trend — and the backlash from the political establishment, which is Harper-government-style overweening message and image control — can only deepen as politicos absorb the lessons of this campaign.

Economy uber alles

Since the 2008-09 recession, Canadians — including Quebecers this spring — have shown steadily declining patience with any program of government, or pattern of behaviour by a politician, that does not constitute a laser focus on value for taxpayers’ money, and simple economic pragmatism. The PQ bet the farm on the notion that Quebecers could be persuaded to coalesce around a philosophical, theoretical concept — the so-called charter of Quebec values — with economic management more or less taken for granted. It was a critical miscalculation, and holds lessons for federal politics — where the Harper government is busily shoring up its credentials as the cautious economic steward of choice — and the Ontario election in the offing.

I am a national political columnist for Postmedia News. My work appears in the National Post, on Canada.com, the Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Halifax Chronicle-Herald... read more and Vancouver Sun, among other publications. I write primarily about national politics and policy.View author's profile